Preparations for his Future, by Marvin Hurt

Silke Heiss

The following derives from an accumulation of diarised notes which I have made efforts to synthesise. I do not claim to be a writer (far from it) and ask for indulgence in case of technical or even structural errors. No human has read either the notes or the testimonial which follows, as I am not well-connected. As for my motivation, that will become apparent, perhaps, during the course of reading. The reader is under no obligation. Thank you for your time.

I sold my shares in a computing company and retired early. I travelled the world for a few years. Perhaps in search of a hobby or another occupation that would relieve what was increasingly becoming a pervasive and debilitating problem in my life - boredom. I had never been free of it, but duties had kept it at bay. In relinquishing these, I admit I was giving myself up to a strange, unpleasantly interminable disease. Although I had, of course, given up my job precisely on account of the extent to which it bored me. It was a Catch-22 situation.

I ceased seeking out places of beauty or entertainment. I was not at home in those. I began to linger around dumps, factory sites, and even ghettos, where criminality was high. But even muggers and gangsters seemed to suspect that their evildoing would make no impact on me, for they let me pass by unhurt each time I entered into the foul, neglected spaces where they lurked. More than once I was approached as a prospective buyer of narcotics, and I would be dishonest if I denied that I had briefly satisfied some of these dealers. I say briefly, for although the effect of various substances was certainly to alter my perceptual and conceptual capacities, the alterations failed to enthral me and left no desire within me for repetition. I admit I did once believe myself to be a wall, which amused those in my company at the time.

Needless to say, I have no true friends, since my abiding want of interest in anything is exasperating and finally intolerable.

Ah, interest: inter esse - the exchange between beings, things, subjects and objects. Those joys and pangs are not for me.

I have made efforts to improve myself by consulting doctors, including physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists, which provided me with a variety of speculations as to the cause of my abnormality. But in the end, all diagnoses failed to hold. I do not have ME, as I am fit, handy and able when necessary. I am not depressed, since I participate, and am even entertaining, in company as required. I am not schizophrenic, as I cannot be said to be inhabited by a confused, private world. And I am not psychotic, as I am innocent of ever having caused harm either to myself or to others. Nor do I have a brain tumour; and my nervous, vascular, lymphatic and hormonal systems are intact. Changes in dietary habits have changed the colour, texture and frequency of my stools, but not my disposition, which remains at heart disengaged. Suicide has not entered my mind, though it has been suggested once or twice by the more frivolous among my acquaintances. Or perhaps they were merely being sympathetic? It is not for me to judge.

One afternoon I was whiling away my time in a scrap-yard. I had been there before, the overseer knew me and no doubt considered me a bit touched. Yet he tolerated me on account of my harmlessness. He also believed, not without grounds, that I spread the word of his whereabouts and advertised his hardware. I suppose I was, despite everything, still fulfilling a social duty in this way, in an attempt to minister, however futilely, to my affliction. At first, I merely registered a peroxided crew-cut bobbing up at intervals between the tyreless hulls of cars. My attention was mildly aroused when I noticed, at the head's next emergence from behind a red Opel Corsa, a pair of ears inhuman in their form. Indeed, they not so much resembled as were a pair of mouse or rat-ears: upon the fuzzy cranium they stood outlined in pink. I was so startled - startled, yes, I was startled! - that I rushed closer and managed still to glimpse the veins presented to me by the golden light behind the ears. Red, and leaflike, and altogether otherworldly. I might have been dazed, and might have given myself impulsively over to praise my sense of sight upon receiving this vision, if an obscure, yet definite, instinct had not at once directed me towards what was transparently to be a revelation. Daniel in the lion's den could not have been more alerted on hearing his god's voice.

That was the end of my boredom. If I had known then what would follow, I may have reflected and hesitated, at the least. But my destiny was pointed out to me, at last. I was forty-nine and could not falter.

The head disappeared again, but by then I was in pursuit. On the next occasion of its bobbing up, its ears had normalised and become human again. But the creature - which was no beauty - had seated itself behind the steering wheel of one of the roofless cars - it was one of those old, box-like Mercedes Benzes, olive green in colour. Notwithstanding her image, she was luring me with frightfully (do I say "frightfully"? Yes! I was frightened … ) mischievous, glittering eyes. Bless my little Ratty.

I hurried towards her, but she leapt away and was at once invisible to me. Hide and seek is easy in a scrap-yard - for the one in hiding, that is.

Bereft and idiotic, yet still alarmed, I stood looking around. My nostrils, I daresay, were flickering with sensation. Sensation, yes! Oh, if only I had had time then to wallow in my new-found joy. Yet I shall not complain, for the memory of my awakening is almost as intoxicating as was the original event.
I stood, as I said, with my arms hanging by my sides, no doubt appearing foolish, when something at my foot distracted me, and a smell reached my nose that numbed and excited me all at once - to an indecent degree, I might add. But it was too late for scruples. She was nibbling at my chestnut-leather moccasin. As my eye fell upon her, she transformed at once into the … (I have promised myself that I shall be honest) the crone with the peroxide crew-cut. Naturally, I shall not be believed. No doubt I had experimented with yet another drug. Ah, no. Ah, no. Truth is stranger than fiction, and times to come harbour unspoken surprises.

The next thing I knew I was running, sprinting to keep up with a small, white creature (my darling Ratty) no bigger than my hand. We exited the scrap-yard, she turning her head to check that I was following, rolling on her quick legs through the gutters beside broken pavements. And I, panting behind. It seemed to me then as if I would prophesy. As if all my energies, conserved so exactingly for forty-nine years, would now be put to use for some future purpose of which I was not yet fully aware.

Ah, Ratty. Must I continue for your sake? You wish for me to write a testimonial. But the language of ordinary men and women does not lend itself, my Dear, to the place and time, or the Body, in which we two find ourselves together.

She bids me go on. I am her slave.

The Body. Place and Time. Those are key words, I think.

Eventually, the mysterious creature stopped running, and I obeyed her motion. We had reached the outer limit of the industrial area. Opposite the busy thoroughfare was a small shopping complex. The rat, which, I noticed, was also panting, paused. It was hunched almost piteously beside a grille for drainage.

It may be imagined that I doubted myself then. Perhaps I did. But if so, that doubt was not sufficiently powerful to silence the clamorous desire that had taken root in me. I was aroused by both fear and curiosity. A dangerous, irresistible combination. For what is fear, if one allows it in its purest form, but respect for a cast die? As for curiosity, its purpose points towards a higher form of healing. A height which may be reached through climbing, or by plunging. As I plunged, face down, onto the terrible grille. The end of my boredom indeed.

It was then that I journeyed into the prophecies, that is to say, I was initiated into the secrets hitherto withheld from, but always ordained for, my knowledge. In the tent, where we now lived, she - the crone in the crew-cut - at times seemed to grow younger as she shed her folds. They seemed to peel off her easily, almost oily in texture, as she bent over me with a warmth so convincing that the peaks of her hair seemed like the hot tips of flames emanating from her very core. She had me in her grip. In the desert to which she had brought me, I was like a baby - forgetful of all my past as she instructed me. For which purpose she mantled herself again in the form of an old woman, sagging, grey, fragile, yet eternal. Only the liquid, tourmaline-black little eyes remained the same, regardless of the surrounding - more or less pleasing - accidents of shape. Darling Ratty, my Saviour.

Where my schooling took place I cannot say with accuracy. The locale seemed, as I have said, desert-like. How long it lasted I have no feeling for, though I have commuted to my former place of residence - a bachelor flat in Preston Heights near the highway interchange - to settle accounts and in general to keep up appearances. I have thus an awareness of the fact that it has been six measurable years.

"The writing is on the wall," says Raphaela (which is how she likes me to name her here).

I kiss her delicate, rounded auricle. Not a day goes by without my admiring the fine bloodlines in that miraculous conch. She is wearing a soft, fawn-coloured leather dress, sleeveless, with tassels at the hem. Her face - always somewhat chinless - with its nostril-flaring, over-sensitive, pinkish nose, is fairly youthful today, such that the light head seems genuinely to be a silvery, childlike blonde, rather than hiding the hoary. Over her arms, too, and her legs, lie these infinitely wispy lines of fair summer grass.

"Moss will grow over the factories," she is saying. "Everything will change."

"Clear the colour of the sky," I say, brushing aside a thin strand of hair that has fallen into her eyes.

Raphaela became more serious. She aged again. I did not love her less for it, but it made her more formidable. Watching the process, it seemed as if she was boiling herself down to bare essentials. The dress, which previously she had filled out, hung from her bony shoulders. Her collarbones formed cups on either side below her tortoise-like throat. I put the fingers of my hands into the cups.

"Make it blush," said Raphaela, "scream, and cry."

I rubbed my unshaven cheek on her papery skin. Her nose trembled. She began to sniff. Her thin, soft lips opened and I painted them very gently with my middle finger. Then she bit me with brown teeth and grinned, and as she did so, she emerged again from her ancient wrapping, like a new moth from its weathered chrysalis, seeking me for light, sucking me into the depths of its velvety darkness. If she was frenzied, then it was for the sake of our future, which we were trying against so many obstacles to embody.

I confess that, against her advice and finally without her knowledge, I smuggled Raphaela's deerskin dress to Preston Heights. It still bore traces of her ecstasy. I felt I needed it to reassure me as I performed the tiresome errands. For I had ceased to believe in this world which, for me, was already a bygone era, a civilisation in ruins.

Yet if I should have doubted my darling Ratty's connection to this side, those doubts were put aside for good by subsequent developments.

I returned from the supermarket with toilet rolls and cans of sweetcorn and beans for the maid, whom I still employed on a casual basis. I was exhausted by car fumes, noise, an excess of human faces, when I returned to my flat. Raphaela was correct, I thought. Things had to change. Neither heaven nor earth could be expected to sustain such disorder as one is compelled to find on the streets, on sidewalks, beside channelled rivers weeping litter, or forlorn bodies in broken boots. And yes, I was truly interested in Raphaela's plans. How could I not be? Desire for her smell made me hungry for necessities other than food.

I deposited the shopping on the kitchen counter and went through to the bedroom, where lay my tawny skin. At least, that was where I expected it to be. It had vanished, however, and in its place was the crone from the scrap-yard, in tight-fitting, awfully slinky black pants and a vulgar ruched boob-tube around the empty sac of her crouching, yet not unproud, torso. She had her face turned away from me and was looking at me by way of the mirror on the cupboard door opposite the bed, which showed us to each other on its glassy plane.

We stared in silence for a moment; then a flicker in her pool-black eyes brought me to attention in the present, and I noticed a festering, open sore on Raphaela's bare shoulder.

"You took a piece of my hide," she said.

As she uttered the words, a yawning horror overcame me, as I felt the boredom of my past life surreptitiously finger my consciousness. So it was still there. My deliverance had been an illusion. I stood, paralysed.
Then Raphaela looked around and directly at me, growing ever older, till at length she seemed shrivelled, almost black, like carbon. I noticed that the fabric of her pants was no thicker than carbon paper; it even rustled in the manner of those gossamer dark sheets one expects to find in every invoice book.

"Nothing here," she croaked, "but two."

I shook my head.

"Nothing here," I managed to croak back, "but you."

I felt a burst of desire as she appeared to emerge, diamond-like, from the coaly cove of her disappointment or betrayal. Her voice became clearer, till at length it rang: "Nothing like four eyes" - here she returned her gaze to the mirror, and I followed - "four eyes compounded together, like flies."

Still I felt myself to be under attack by the disease I thought I - or she - had conquered. For that reason, I must for a moment have averted my gaze in favour of a shameful preoccupation with personal concerns. When I raised my head again, Raphaela had disappeared, and in her place lay, in suffering repose, my darling little Ratty. The wound on her shoulder burned pinkly, urgently. I washed and disinfected it, controlling at all costs my desire to lick it into wellness by means of the useless saliva of my animal love. No, indeed, I spat into my hands and smeared the foam into my own face, smelling my own stagnation and woeful disbelief.

Alas, my pain evaporated. As the rat's wound deepened, refusing to heal, no matter how much milk or ham I provided for her, my phlegmatic disposition resurfaced and obliterated the feeling I might once have borne in my soul. I buried her in the garden at the bottom of Preston Heights, beneath some well-established narcissi. The whole situation demanded mourning, of which I am once more incapable. It does not interest me sufficiently.

Notwithstanding which I have retrieved my investments and founded a park in another suburb, upon which I have imposed a deeply personal design. There was public outrage when initially I had trees uprooted and indigenous bushes removed - an outrage which I succeeded in ameliorating by transplanting the unwanted vegetation in a newly-electrified squatter camp. The act gave me no satisfaction, but it pleased the residents in the shacks, or at any rate their representatives. There was shade now, and blooms, where none had been before. That is how it ought to be, one is told. No one thanked me; nor would there have been a purpose in doing so.

I confess that my boredom now lacks the purity it possessed before. When I wander through my park at sunset, over the expanse of moss I have maintained at considerable expense, I invariably stop at the cast-metal rods, pillars, cogs, cylinders and blocks installed upon the soft green surface. I admit: I wait for that surface to rise of its own accord. Beyond the structure is fine, red sand brought in (at the cost of forty thousand pounds) from the Namib Desert, where I believe Raphaela attempted to heal and love me. Though it is impossible to be certain. People call the park, which is open to the public at a fairly high fee, a work of art; indeed, some have said it is a three-dimensional Haiku poem; or even an instruction in Zen Buddhism. Of course, it is none of those. Perhaps it is a testimonial. The cherry-wood cupboard with its mirror-hung door on the park's edge is considered avant-garde. In the mornings, when the security guards have removed the plastic cover, the sun glares off it unbearably. So I have had it hung with white seal-fur. You can imagine the outcry. But they were old coats. And the cries have already lost themselves in the orbit of time or, speaking more locally, money. At noon, I have directed, the fur is to be removed, it is to be unclipped and allowed to fall in a heap onto the dry, red sand, leaving the mirror free to ponder and roam. In the evenings, such as now, one thus advances towards one's own golden face. If one so chooses. For the park is wide, and the cupboard is but a narrow vertical construct upon the horizontal plane, easy to avoid.

Yet I never fail to do my duty. I gaze upon my reflected visage with perfect indifference, as an animal might upon another that has no relevance to itself. My large-rimmed spectacles, and my cropped grey hair, which is still peppered here and there by black, present an altogether unremarkable, that is to say in all likelihood bored, entity.

If I wait, however, I can feel my nose beginning to twitch imperceptibly. I will not deny that this is the moment at which I come alive. It is as if then a warm golden stream writhes through my pelvis and upwards. I suppose to an outsider I might appear to be dancing. But there are never outsiders. I am invariably alone, preparing for my future. A fly clinging for its life to the ooze of an animal's sore. Do I moan? Most certainly not; though I own that I utter her name: "Ratty, Ratty, Ratty". Through my by now chattering teeth (for the sun will have gone down). Perhaps it is merely the crickets in the bushes on the other side of the sandstone wall. It does not interest me sufficiently to tell the difference between myself and a cricket, or between a rat and the soulless fly that I am.

And if I should lick the sandpaper of my own cheeks (I have an unusually long tongue) - yes, I do lick my face on evenings such as this - then I come away with the heartening taste of salt. I say heartening, because despite everything I … I cross the desert of longing again, passing the metal construct (oh, her dreams, may they come to pass), and softly return over the carpet laid out in her terrible, ancient honour. (The park has only a single gate, situated at the beginning of the half-acre moss floor.)

Back in my flat, I remove one from my stock of one kilogram Cerebos packets, return downstairs and empty it over her grave, of whose existence only I am aware. I kneel down and put my face in the heap till my shame stings me. The name Raphaela courses spikily through my body. Of the rest I cannot speak, for it belongs to the future and the revelation of possibilities. Then I rise and make sure to mingle soil with salt, hiding my traces.

I go upstairs again and switch on the television. Or go out with - or may even receive - company, to appear seemly.

"If nothing else," I might say to them, "I understand my boredom now."

And for some reason - it must have to do with the age - this satisfies them immensely.

MH, November 2002

About the Author

Silke Heiss has written short stories since the early 90s. She has had one of them published (Jala, 1991). She completed an M.A. in Creative Writing at UCT in 2002, and was awarded second prize for her novel in the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Competition. She has published poems in New Coin, New Contrast, several Poetry Institute of Africa anthologies, and will soon have a PoetryNet page. She has recently been awarded a grant from the National Arts Council of South Africa in aid of a collection of her short stories which she hopes to finalise within a year. Preparations for his Future by Marvin Hurt will be the title story.

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